Across Penwith, brightness is at a premium on this dull November day. Off Penzance the sea is streaked with light, but St Michael's Mount is a gloomy shadow. In sheltered gardens St Ewe camellias already flower and by Castle Horneck long-tailed tits flit among sparse orange leaves clinging to beech trees. Beyond neglected fields, bare frames of vacant polytunnels and wintry ash catch the sun, and along the path to Madron's hilltop church we pass granite coffin stiles and an ancient cross. Northwards, narrow sunken lanes are strewn with squashed berries from stunted hawthorns, in hedges thick with next year's foxglove plants, upright ferns and a sprinkling of pale campions. Higher up, under darkening clouds and overlooked by bleak Ding Dong mine, a few knots of bullocks range across small pastures bounded by wind-blasted gorse and blackthorn growing on the boulder-based banks.

Former farmsteads and outhouses in isolated hamlets have been renovated and converted, the rough granite walls and crude moorstone gateposts incongruous beside autumnal red hydrangeas and plastic loungers. Circular foundations with door openings protrude through the turf, marking an iron age settlement at Bodrifty, and up on these faded heather commons and downs old paths and tracks follow parish boundaries. Rain blots out Zennor Quoit. The north coast is invisible apart from a glimpse of misty Wicca Pool, far below this buttress of hills and out beyond the coastal network of stone-walled, tiny green fields. We descend through brambly thickets of yellow gorse and sodden brown bracken, heading for St Ives. Muddy paths and granite stiles are within sound of the roaring sea. Below the deserted Tate gallery, wet sand on the darkening Porthmeor beach glistens faintly, reflecting the last of daylight.